Canceling In-Flight Requests with Axios
Learn how to cancel in-flight requests to avoid race conditions, wasted work, and stale UI updates in React.
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In dynamic interfaces like search bars or dashboards, rapid user input can trigger a cascade of network requests before previous ones complete. For instance, as a user types "React," the app might request results for "R," then "Re," and "Rea" in quick succession. Without a cancellation strategy, a race condition can occur: a slower, obsolete response might arrive after a newer one, overwriting the UI with stale data. This flood of redundant requests also wastes bandwidth and degrades application performance, leading to an inconsistent and sluggish user experience. That’s where request cancellation comes in. Instead of letting every request run to completion, we can abort unnecessary requests as soon as they’re no longer needed
Why canceling requests matters
When dealing with fast user interactions or multiple state changes, it’s easy for overlapping network requests to get out of sync. Consider two requests:
Request A: Triggered ...